Customer Reviews

Baroque-a-Nova

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

.... I was checking out new titles--usually I build up a list of new titles I want and send an order to an online store--but I was absolutely taken with Baroque-a-nova. I bought it there, full price, took it home and read it that night.

Kevin Chong has a smart engaging voice. He can throw down a sentence so clean you hardly are aware that you are reading a book. He knows how to pick the exact right details so the novel beautifully opens the world of its 18-year old narrator.

If you're looking for a fun, smartly humourous book to read--something like Vancouveer meets Houlden Caulfield meets 1990s multicultural communities--give this one a spin. I don't think you're regret it.

....

This may be the best book I've ever read. I laughed so hard I think I cracked my spine. Everyone should read this book, and anyone who doesn't like it should be banned for life from all water slides.
Chong for President!

I never had a brother so this book was perfect for me, because it was about a young, intrepid young man in high school with a decent libido and a wise-cracking mouth, and I just thought it was so darn funny and warm-hearted and I can't say enough good things about it.

I think we can expect great things from Chong, and this book is certainly worth the credit card debt.

It's one of those books where you just wish there was some more Chong to read right after. I want more Chong!! More Chong books!!

Kevin Chong's book is a fast-paced entertaining reading experience. The premise of a faded once-famous Canadian folk singer's son coming to terms with himself as a young man and his parent's past works well. The charcter of Saul St. Pierre is appropriately confused and ambivalent. The father Ian comes off as a self-absorbed loser who would like to be a better man than he is. I enjoyed the character of Leni, Helena St. Pierre, the reclusive mother who seek and shuns the spotlight at the same time only to walk out on the singing act and wind up in a monestary in Thailand and then commit suicide. We see her in several flashbacks, but she comes off as a woman of mystery, intensely interesting. The plot takes off as Urethra Franklin, a rap band, redoes the St. Pierre's hit "Bushmills Threnody" and causes the spotlight to be refocused on the faded folk act after decades of obscurity. Complications arise as two groupies, Louise and Marina, come into the picture to seduce father and son, respectively. References to other singers like Roger Miller, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Warren Zevon give the tale a sense of reality. At times I was confused as Chong writes dialogue without identifiers that made it hard to determine who was speaking. The novel is alternately funny and touching, but in the end somewhat an enigma, similar to the character of Leni. Jackson Browne once sang, "It's like a song I can hear playing right in my head...," and "Baroque-A-Nova" is similarly a good time if not a great novel. Enjoy.